so my name is xurxo igrexas, i moved from spain to the united states when i was 8 and i have always been into languages, since even when i was little i had to be trilingual. im 17 and a soccer and football player and most of my friends dont know what i do with my spare time, which is write fiction, and i have written around 27 or so languages (mostly just the first article of the UDHR or that passage from the Bible on this site). Most of them have been loosely based on the Romance Languages, since my native languages are Galician, Spanish, and Portuguese, and my mother's family is Sicilian and so I have also learned over the years to speak Sicilian and Italian as well.

Anyways, the last 9 or so languages have taken a different turn, because I now understand noun declension much better, agglutination, and what ergative-absolutism is in a language. The languages will ALL be used in my books, whenever I finish writing them, and I wanted to present two of them to you guys and ask your opinion.

The first two are called Turjakese and Calderish. They are distintly related and both ergative-absolutive and slightly agglutinative languages. They also both have a strict subject-object-verb word order, which is never broken for any reason.

Calderish is influenced a lot by the sounds in paleohispanic languages, specifically Tartessian, but also by Mark Ocrand's Atlantean Language. Turjakese uwas influenced a lot more by Atlantean but I also employed the help of Uto-Aztecan and Pamaduan languages in the sound, but it uses the same grammar system as Calderish. Anyways, here are the sample texts, and I'll have pronunciation for you soon. Right now it's late, and I need to go to bed, and I'll elaborate more later I promise.

Yeah I apologize it was really late and the computer was being gay...anyways, here's the phonology for both, which I put together this morning.

Vowelsa: pronounced like the a in Spanish pan.e: always pronounced with a long ay sound, like in English mane. ə: pronounced like the eh in men, but can also be slurred into an uh sound, depending on dialect.i: pronounced like a Spanish i, such as in Joaquin or in the name of the Aragonese dialect Chistabín.ı: represents an ih sound, like in English this.o: pronounced like the o in bone.ő: pronounced like in French bleuu: pronounced like the oo in boot, or in Galician lua.ủ: this is an endolabial close central rounded vowel, which is a common feature in the language family that both these languages belong to. It’s pronounced like u in many Irish and Scottish Gaelic words, as in Irish Gaelic ciúin. ǚ: this a nasal vowel, I’m not sure what it’s called but it’s very common in Cherokee and other Iroquoian Languages, like in the Cherokee word vganuweuwe, or anyvnwiya, and in these languages it is represented by a v. This sound is absent in Calderish.

Consonantsb: pronounced like your typical Indo-European b.ć: this sound is absent in High Calderish, accept in some dialects where it is represented by š, and is pronounced as in Italian cucciolo. d: pronounced lightly, like a Spanish d.g: always pronounced like English get.ħ: pronounced like in German Rauch, or the way we pronounce a j in Spain.ĵ: I don’t really know how to describe this one. It’s sort of like how a lot of us Spanish speakers will slur a y and make it into a slight dzh sound, but it is made by pressing the middle of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. I think it’s called a palatal ejective.k: pronounced like English kite or care.l: as in English lamb.m: pronounced like Spanish mama.n: as in Galician nai, or English nothing.ŋ: this is a velar nasal sound, like in the Galician place name Boqueixon, or in the word unha.p: as in English pipe.r: like Spanish roja.s: as in English sort.š: pronounced as a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative, as in Polish śruba, but in some dialects can be pronounced with more of a tsh, as in the Italian name Berstraccio.t: like a Spanish t, a little softer than English.w: this is a voiced bilabial fricative, and is pronounced like Catalan blava.

Both languages are ergative-absolutive and also fusional and agglutinative. both languages also assign suffixes in order to indicate plurality, however consonants will also change to indicate this as well. also both languages employ gender within their verbs, with six different genders, which are a person younger than you, a person older than you, the neuter, male and female, and a formal gender, like someone you've just met, or someone of royal blood.

Verbs also will have fifteen different moods, which all conjugate differently in every form according to gender and mood. The moods are indicative, declarative, energetic, generic, sujbunctive, dubitative, hypothetical, potential, presumptive, conditional, optative, imperative, admirative, interrogative, and renarrative.

The cases for nouns are ergative and absolutive, genitive, dative, adessive, adelative, postessive, postelative, postdirective, subessive, subelative, subdirective, inessive, inelative, superessive, superelative, and superdirective. I'll have that to you in awhile

xurxoigrexas wrote:Yeah I apologize it was really late and the computer was being gay...anyways, here's the phonology for both, which I put together this morning.

Wish my computer were gay, but I'm pretty sure mine is asexual.

ǚ: this a nasal vowel, I’m not sure what it’s called but it’s very common in Cherokee and other Iroquoian Languages, like in the Cherokee word vganuweuwe, or anyvnwiya, and in these languages it is represented by a v. This sound is absent in Calderish.

Nasal schwa, that's what it is in Cherokee at least.

ħ: pronounced like in German Rauch, or the way we pronounce a j in Spain.ĵ: I don’t really know how to describe this one. It’s sort of like how a lot of us Spanish speakers will slur a y and make it into a slight dzh sound, but it is made by pressing the middle of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. I think it’s called a palatal ejective.

For your ħ you want either /R/ for the German R, or /x/ for the Spanish J. For ĵ I think you want /ʝ/, the voiced palatal fricative, one of my favorite sounds.

Anyway, have you ever thought about making a phonology with X-SAMPA or IPA? It's a lot easier to read and comment on, and you can see whether the phoneme inventory you have is normal.

I like the orthography; it's very intriguing. What made you deside to you the schwa symbol instead of a diacritic. My only suggestion is to be a little more consistent with your vowel orthography. I like how you have it, but it might be easier to use a couple of diacritics instead of new symbols alltogether.

ILuvEire wrote:xurxoigrexas wrote:Yeah I apologize it was really late and the computer was being gay...anyways, here's the phonology for both, which I put together this morning.

Wish my computer were gay, but I'm pretty sure mine is asexual.

very funny...

ILuvEire wrote:

ħ: pronounced like in German Rauch, or the way we pronounce a j in Spain.ĵ: I don’t really know how to describe this one. It’s sort of like how a lot of us Spanish speakers will slur a y and make it into a slight dzh sound, but it is made by pressing the middle of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. I think it’s called a palatal ejective

.

For your ħ you want either /R/ for the German R, or /x/ for the Spanish J. For ĵ I think you want /ʝ/, the voiced palatal fricative, one of my favorite sounds.

I agree about the ĵ =/ʝ/ part (I love that sound too), but I think he was referring to the –ch in the German word in which case it would be /χ/, right?

ħ: pronounced like in German Rauch, or the way we pronounce a j in Spain.ĵ: I don’t really know how to describe this one. It’s sort of like how a lot of us Spanish speakers will slur a y and make it into a slight dzh sound, but it is made by pressing the middle of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. I think it’s called a palatal ejective

.

For your ħ you want either /R/ for the German R, or /x/ for the Spanish J. For ĵ I think you want /ʝ/, the voiced palatal fricative, one of my favorite sounds.

I agree about the ĵ =/ʝ/ part (I love that sound too), but I think he was referring to the –ch in the German word in which case it would be /χ/, right?

I haven't abandoned Turjakese and Calderish as of yet, I'm just not sure how to apply them in my book as the story/setting of the book have taken a radically different turn. I have decided to abandon all Romance-based conlangs in the realization that this was a very lame idea. All of them resembled actual Romance languages too closely and their linguistic development made absolutely no sense at all, especially given the fact that they were going to be spoken in a fictional setting on another planet. In order for Romance languages to exist at all, a Romance-speaking population would have to have been transported from Earth somehow at some point, and since the languages all borrowed various features from various groups within the family it just wasn't going to work. So, the new ideas are not so Terran-based. The inhabitants of this planet are of course human though, so we're not going to be talking about how some alien's mouth works and the different kinds of consonants that it can pronounce that are unpronounceable to humans. I like Turjakese and Calderish (although I think I made Calderish waaaaay to complicated for an actual spoken language), but I don't necessarily like how they sound for the application of the languages that are concerned with the protagonist of my story, so I would like to put them aside for now.

The principle language encountered in the first book is going to be called Drucpel, but we can go there later. The reason I am resurrecting this long dead topic is actually because I am trying to figure out two of the languages encountered in the second book: Svipureănna and Parnaslan. Unlike the majority of the languages meant for this fictional world, these two (or at least Svipureănna) have a Terran base. This is because there is a rather eradic connection between Earth and this world that allows people to sometimes travel between the two. Mostly it's just individuals, but at least in one for sure case an entire population as moved. In the case of Svipureănna, it is supposed to be based on an early diverging dialect of Proto-Celtic from sometime before the break up of the Celtic languages into their individual branches (Gaulish, Celtiberian, Brythonic, and Goidelic). So I was wondering two things: A) do you guys know of any good online material for Proto-Celtic, since I'm having trouble finding any and B) do you think that it is possible given the amount of time (some 2600 years or so), is it possible for the descendants of this dialect to make a shift from nominative-accusative to nominative-absolutive? I was thinking that such a grammatical shift could be achieved by nasalizing the final vowels of nouns in the accusative case (since in Proto-Celtic it always ends in /m/) and perhaps assigning a new marker to the nominative as other cases merge or are lost (ablative with instrumental, dative with genitive)? Mind you, we're not looking for an Insular Celtic sound to the language here, so I would like to drop consonant mutation altogether and perhaps vowel mutation as well.

The other language, Parnaslan, in theory is supposed to be descended from Proto-Dravidian. But I am unable to find any good literary material online or at the library (but I live in Hawai'i these days, so that's not so surprising) for Proto-Dravidian. Do you guys know of any? I'm not married to the idea really, I may stick with Svipureănna being the only Earth-introduced language that gets any significant mention in the story, but I am also open to ideas for other ancient languages as a base as well. I suppose the idea in having them both be Earth-introduced was having two early forms of languages spoken on Earth that would have never encountered each other here interacting and exchanging with one another on this world. It was just an idea though.

carusu_babaluciu wrote:So I was wondering two things: A) do you guys know of any good online material for Proto-Celtic, since I'm having trouble finding any and B) do you think that it is possible given the amount of time (some 2600 years or so), is it possible for the descendants of this dialect to make a shift from nominative-accusative to nominative-absolutive? I was thinking that such a grammatical shift could be achieved by nasalizing the final vowels of nouns in the accusative case (since in Proto-Celtic it always ends in /m/) and perhaps assigning a new marker to the nominative as other cases merge or are lost (ablative with instrumental, dative with genitive)? Mind you, we're not looking for an Insular Celtic sound to the language here, so I would like to drop consonant mutation altogether and perhaps vowel mutation as well.

Of course it's possible; that's approximately the timespan over which certain Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Hindi, Kurdish) developed ergativity. Of course, the exhibit split-ergativity, which IIRC is more common than pure ergativity anyway, and they developed it in quite a different way than you're suggestings--and one that has parallels in the modern Celtic languages.

In modern Irish, for instance, there is a construction "to be" PATIENT PAST.PART ag AGENT (e.g. Tá an leabhar léite agam "is the book read at-me" = "I have read the book"). Its use is rather restricted (mainly completives in the recent past), but it's easy to see how it could spread. This is essentially what happened in North Indic: an originally passive construction became the default for completed action and was generalised.